Breda Beban, still from 'The Most Beautiful Woman in Gucha', courtesy the artist

Being curator and creative producer for Tate Britain’s Imagine Art After was a challenge London-based artist Breda Beban met with gusto. She talks to ArtRabbit about following her gut instinct, the making of her new film and her growing reputation as ‘the diva of Balkan spirit’.

ArtRabbit: Imagine Art After brings together artists who have left their home countries and now live in London with artists who have stayed in the shared country of origin. Can you tell me about how the project came into being?

Breda Beban: By accident, really. In 2004 I was invited by Julia Farrington of Index on Censorship, a magazine that defends free expression, to become a consultant for an exclusively internet based art project that aimed at creating a virtual state for migrant artists. I remember finding the notion of the virtual far more interesting when tested against various social and geopolitical realities. Through a very rapid, three-hour development stage, the original virtual project evolved into a project about the tension between migration and the notion of ‘the local’.

AR: The six artists on show are the ones that made it through the various stages of Imagine Art After – tell me more about the stages that preceded the exhibition?

BB: The first edition of Imagine Art After occurred in three stages. For the fist stage, seven couples of artists were selected to take part in an online dialogue hosted by Guardian Unlimited. The second stage was the commission and production of new projects which emerged during or immediately after the dialogue stage. A judging panel gave the go ahead to the projects now on show at Tate Britain. We’re hoping that Imagine Art After will feature every five years in the contemporary art calendar – and we’re aiming for a second edition to be exhibited in 2012 having launched it at the end of this year.

AR: The show brings together artists who are from the same cultural background but are geographically separated. It must have been a challenge finding artists from so many countries – how did you go about finding and selecting the artists in the first place?

BB: We focused on the thirty-five countries whose people, according to the Home Office, make an unusually high number of applications for asylum in the UK, and published an open-call to artists world wide. In a lot of ways the process of selection was very similar to casting a film – sometimes it was not so much on the basis of work already created but more on an instinctive gut feeling that a particular person is right for the project.

AR: How did you go about pairing the artists?

BB: Sometimes by following the notion that the chemistry between the artists could be just right, sometimes by going beyond the obvious while risking failure. For example, when I paired Estabrak, a young London based Arab originally from Iraq, with Awni Sami, a Kurd still based in Iraq, the Imagine Art After team warned me that I was heading for a disaster. However, even though they didn't have many opportunities to chat online due to the fact that the internet in Iraq was unstable, Estabrak and Sami managed to discuss some potentially heartbreaking issues.

AR: Tell me more about the creative producer element of your role.

BB: Imagine Art After involved spending about ten percent of my time curating as it is classically perceived and the rest spent creative producing, which is very similar to film directing or producing a record. The process involved project development, coaching and guiding the artists, organising, scheduling, and supervising both the production and the post-production process. I also took on the role of cinematographer for Denis Hyka’s film in Finding Grandma’s Garden.

AR: How did the artists respond to seeing their work being displayed at Tate Britain?

BB: Most of the artists felt, I quote, ‘like being in a dream’. For example, ‘Mufiwa Osifuye, a Lagos based artist whose photographs were printed, framed and staged in London in his absence, was speechless upon walking into the Goodison room at Tate. The production value of his work was far beyond his expectations. When I took Addis Ababa based Addisalem Bizuwork to see her work there were four teenage schoolgirls sitting on the floor making exact copies of her paintings. They told us these paintings were their favourite works at Tate – that was Bizuwork’s welcome to the display of her work. Overall, however, I don’t think that the artists were aware of the enormous effort that the Imagine Art After team invested into bringing work that was not previously recognised as even being on the margins of the contemporary art world into a huge corporate organisation like the Tate.

AR: It seems that in a lot of the pieces the artists have invested so much of their own deeply personal experiences. Denis Hyka’s emotional journey to his grandmother’s garden via Violana Murataj’s film particularly comes to mind.

BB: When the project started Hyka, who hasn’t been back to Tirana for ten years, made a drawing entitled Garden of Dreams, which represented his grandmother’s garden. Murataj suggested tracking the garden down and from there they came up with the concept for a two-screen film. The first segment is Murataj’s search for the garden. The second segment shows a close-up of Hyka’s face as he watches Murataj’s journey to the grandmother’s apartment and garden, and finally to the grandmother’s grave. Little did we know that his grandmother would die during the production of the piece – so for Hyka the production stage was tremendously difficult and you see this emotional turmoil in his face.

AR: Estabrak also faced big challenges in making her film Self-portrait with Aunt and Rebecca, which explores two parts of her identity.

BB: The nature of her work is very delicate – coming out as a lesbian within the context of a Muslim family – when, as we know, being gay is perceived as a sin by the Muslim religion. Now, upon completion and staging of the film, which captures Estabrak coming out to her aunt, she feels that she can finally breathe – she has claimed the right to be who she really is. What I think is great about Estabrak’s piece is that as we see two worlds collide – the context of her family’s religion and her very contemporary UK existence – somehow we’re not asked to take sides.

AR: There is so much more going on behind the artworks than at first meets the eye…

BB: Yes, so many big stories. But I do hope that the concepts and intensity of feelings captured by individual projects reflect the complexity of issues and the passion invested in the work. It is also interesting that throughout the various stages of the project it became apparent that those of us who have migrated from one culture to another have in the process discovered different aspects of ourselves that would have remained dormant if we had stayed in the country of origin. I think the significance of Imagine Art After, among other things, is that it allows insight into issues like this and will hopefully encourage new ideas which will contribute to these debates.

AR: A lot your work is centred on your own journeys within cultures and places. Your most recent film, The Most Beautiful Woman in Gucha, [which was met with critical acclaim at the Venice Biennale earlier this year and inspired Branko Franceschi, the director of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka, Croatia, to describe Beban as ‘the contemporary diva of Balkan spirit’], sees you return to your homeland Serbia. What was the inspiration behind the film?

BB: The piece was filmed at a gathering of Romany musicians in Gucha, a small town in Serbia. I went with the intention to listen to the music I love, to dance and to have fun. Filming twenty hours of footage was somehow part of the fun. Then, when I was back in London I was viewing the footage and there it was – a moment of magic created between a dancer and a young drunken man fuelled by the music of a Romany band. I extracted a nineteen minute unedited segment from the footage and then edited an eight minute long story. When the film is staged in a gallery, a tension is created between the unedited ‘documentary’ segment and the edited footage which gestures towards a fiction.

AR: Are you exploring how to portray truth?

BB: Not really. It’s more about perception and how intimate I can be with the world. I thought that if I want to communicate these things I have to put them into slow motion, because only then can I start telling this story. There’s a promise of love between these two people, which is constantly disturbed by the dancer’s bodyguard and manager, but every now and again it’s momentarily re-established.

AR: In a lot of your previous films, such as Walk of Three Chairs and Absence She Said, music plays a strong part. Is this the case here?

BB: Absolutely. In The Most Beautiful Woman in Gucha I refer to two traditions of Romany music in the Balkans – the combat one, which is recorded as location sound and the romantic one, which I’ve used in post-production. The ongoing transition between the two music traditions facilitates a movement between the public domain and an intimate moment – a kind of ‘I think I’m falling in love’ gravity of the moment.

AR: Will we get a chance to see it in the UK?

BB: It opens at Tate Britain on the 1 February 2008.